4 /10 1 Votes4
Language English Pages 156 Originally published 1977 Page count 156 | 2/5 Goodreads ISBN 978-0800708979 Country United States of America | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
People also search for Running the good race, Bless this House | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation's Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality is a 1977 book by Anita Bryant, in which Bryant provides an account of her evangelical Christian campaign against a gay rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida. The claims Bryant makes about homosexuality in the book have been described as false and unscholarly in nature.
Contents
Summary
Bryant provided an account of her evangelical Christian campaign against a gay rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida. She wrote that homosexuality is spread through recruitment, and that gay people can change their sexual orientation. Bryant wrote that "The women's liberation programs...have weakened family ties", that "single men are the chief source of crime and social disruption", that "marriage is essential to male socialization", and that "as the more liberal life-styles come into the open, divorce rates soar, leaving the debris of human tragedy behind to suffer. The debris? Our children." Bryant called the gay rights movement an "escape from sexual responsibilities and its display a threat to millions of young men who have precarious masculine identities."
Reception
Casper G. Schmidt, writing in "The Group-Fantasy Origins of AIDS", an article published in the Journal of Psychohistory in 1984, commented that Bryant outlines the major issues of concern to opponents of gay rights. He suggested that Bryant was correct in believing that repeal of the gay rights ordinance in Dade County would provoke a larger backlash against the gay rights movement.
Law professor Richard Posner wrote in Sex and Reason (1992) that while Bryant's book is not scholarly, it reflects widespread beliefs about homosexuality. Posner criticized Bryant's views, writing while the causes of a same-sex preference are not well understood, the main factors involved appear to be genetic, hormonal, developmental, or some combination thereof, not recruitment, and that Bryant's assertion that gay people can change their sexual orientation is false in most cases.